Weaving Mi’kmaq history

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Artist Ursula Johnson asked people, in her exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn, to draw a picture of what they think a basket is and turned the drawings into functionless, ‘mutant’ baskets with fictional histories in her O’pltek series. Fishing Creel has the fictional function of holding parents’ purses while they shop for farmed fish. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

Artist Ursula Johnson asked people, in her exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn, to draw a picture of what they think a basket is and turned the drawings into functionless, ‘mutant’ baskets with fictional histories in her O’pltek series. Fishing Creel has the fictional function of holding parents’ purses while they shop for farmed fish. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

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Welkutat, part of an O'pltek series basket affliated with the Mi'kmaq tribe and made out of black ash, white ash, sweetgrass and commerical dye, is described as ‘presented to the best men's clothing maker of the community, so that they may have a new container to store their handmade wooden buttons.’ (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

Welkutat, part of an O'pltek series basket affliated with the Mi'kmaq tribe and made out of black ash, white ash, sweetgrass and commerical dye, is described as ‘presented to the best men's clothing maker of the community, so that they may have a new container to store their handmade wooden buttons.’ (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

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Artist Ursula Johnson's exhibition Mi'kwite'tmn (Do You Remember) opens at the Saint Mary's University Art Gallery on June 6. This piece is titled Mouse Clan and is part of Johnson's O'pltek Basket Series I. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

Artist Ursula Johnson's exhibition Mi'kwite'tmn (Do You Remember) opens at the Saint Mary's University Art Gallery on June 6. This piece is titled Mouse Clan and is part of Johnson's O'pltek Basket Series I. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

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Artist Ursula Johnson poses for a photo with some of her work at the Saint Mary's University Art Gallery on Tuesday. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

Artist Ursula Johnson poses for a photo with some of her work at the Saint Mary's University Art Gallery on Tuesday. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

Ursula Johnson will be at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery for nine days, trying to turn an ash wood log she harvested into splints to make baskets.

She won’t succeed, and that’s the point. “I’ll decimate that log to shavings and splinters that will be tracked over the floor. It’ll be completely obliterated and wasted,” says the Mi’kmaq artist, who was longlisted for the 2014 Sobey Art Award.

The frustrating, repetitive exercise will point out the lack of knowledge her generation has about its culture.

It will also point out the waste of natural resources in today’s disposable consumer world and go against the multidisciplinary artist’s guiding principle of “netukulimk,” which she explains as “ self-sustainability, responsible harvesting” or, simply, “You don’t take stuff if you don’t need it.”

Johnson’s solo, nationally touring exhibit, Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember), curated by the gallery’s director Robin Metcalfe, challenges the way First Nations art and artifacts have been locked away in museums.

“A museum is so much associated with dead things,” she says in an interview in the gallery. “The culture is always living and existing and changing.”

She wants to create a dialogue between First Nations communities and art institutions on who preserves and converses aboriginal language and culture. “Whose responsibility is it? Who determines what is authentic? How can we preserve culture and language?

“I’m a very strong advocate that art is a very powerful tool to initiate dialogue, whether it’s about language preservation or social change or challenges to political bills. I take that job very seriously.”

For Mi’kwite’tmn, Johnson deconstructs and manipulates Mi’kmaq basketry. She was a girl of nine when she wove her first baskets, taught by her late great-grandmother, basketry artist Caroline Gould.

“She helped me make a trinket basket and I gave it to my step dance teacher and I made another one which my great-grandmother kept and then I lost interest,” says Johnson, a 2006 NSCAD University graduate who is currently artist-in-residnece at Unama’ki College, Cape Breton University. “It wasn’t until 2003 that I decided I wanted to make a basket.”

Johnson has also sandblasted in the words for different techniques attached to different parts of the baskets. If basketry dies out, so will these words.

Johnson’s great-grandmother didn’t think Mi’kmaq basket-making would survive. She told Johnson young people didn’t know how to make baskets. “She thought the art form was going to die because people from my generation don’t know the forest.”

However, Johnson, 34, pushes basketry forward as a living cultural expression in the Archive Room, with shelves of “mutant” basket-type objects from her series O’pltek (It is Not Right).

For the Archive she asked people to draw what they think a basket is. She turned these drawings into three-dimensional baskets, some with three handles, others inside-out, that she wove beautifully out of black and white ash, maple, sweet grass and twine.

She also asked the public for titles and to imagine a function for the unusual vessels in “naming parties.”

At the gallery viewers don white gloves, pick up the baskets, scan their bar codes into a computer and discover the object’s title, materials, tribal affiliation and “speculated history.”

For example, the Firetower, an overturned basket perched on top of hooped splints, has a Mi’kmaq tribal affiliation. It’s described as “being a form that wards off spirits that plague communities that suffer from drought and often end in fire.”

Johnson has left one shelving unit. This will get filled up as the exhibit tours across the country and she engages the public in the same process.

Johnson showed her great-grandmother the functionless baskets including an open-ended tube.

“She looked at it and explored it so much and said, ‘How did you do this?’ Then she said, ‘Oh my God, you wove it flat.” She figured out my technique. She said, ‘You are doing what I never would have thought of because I grew up in a different culture.’

“She said, ‘The culture you grew up in is going to influence how you make things.’

“In my mind,” says Johnson, “she gave me permission to play with these materials.”

While the Archive Room is a space of “rebirth and life” the performance space is one of frustation for a generation losing its culture. “People from my generation don’t know what to do. We need to go to our elders.

“I remember in 2010 I went to my grandfather and said, ‘I want to learn how to harvest the trees,’ and he laughed. He knew I was one of those people who wanted to learn everything about my culture in 24 hours. It was a drive-thru mentality.”

Two weeks ago Johnson did fell her own ash tree for this show and she went to her grandfather for help. “He saw that commitment was there. He said, ‘The tree’s not ready yet.' It makes the point more obviously that I cut the tree prematurely.”

Johnson has soaked the log in a river and is waiting until it’s ready.